Written for a public exhibition of "Subversive Graffiti"
organized around a "non-art" premise.

Breaking the Law - A Manifesto

1. The use and demarcation of public and private space have
never been straightforward or self-evident. There is no lasting
consensus among the public, the state, the militia, and economic
institutions, about "rights" of use which is not temporary,
relative, or riddled with holes. The whole terrain is mediated
by inherited norms with clearly arbitrary stipulations, changing
community values, apathy, and overt struggles. One cannot refer
to a consensus as a source of moral authority unless one is willing
to mislead and lie.

2. If you were to tell "the man on the street" repeatedly
that corporations and the city government owned rights to all
the public space, there would eventually be an uprising. That
is exactly a meaning which cannot be followed through. This parallels
so-called 'economics'-where people are subject to a system they
would violently reject if its precepts were clearly articulated
and understood, yet are quite effective and totalizing if sold
with a certain obscuritanist flair.

3. Social discourse is always a biased, inconsistent system.
That is to say, it can never culminate in a meaning which it must
not deny at some other, more crucial level. Fatal contradictions
are sustained by illegal invocations of sentimentality, by short
term fixes of crassness and conformity with are not lucid. The
mental breakdown of society is endlessly postponed by quick fixes,
without it ever making any sense. The social dialog on, say, law,
can never be exhaustively explained. This is a deep paradox, which
reveals that we are all participating in something as ill-defined
as a dream. From this perspective, would-be pragmatists are revealed
as hallucinating mornons.

4. When one takes over public space for unauthorized purposes,
one engages in a dance with chance and the police, and in a debate
with the law. In one sense, public actions are like mass media,
the anonymous projection of messages to large groups; advertising.
"Poopee loves Peepee" seen by thousands driving home
under a certain bridge. But in another sense, they have an added
character-in that the audience confronts the realization that
someone did this, risked themselves to do it, and might meet them
on the street. 'No man's land' areas can become charged with unexpected
ideas or ideologies. Political groups have often played upon this,
using graffiti as a way of creating an exaggerated social presence-The
Thousands, ready to rise up and take the city.

5. When one sees the law for what it is, not breaking it 'on
principle' becomes psychologically incoherent. One shoulders the
ethical questions posed by society-without one iota of society's
tools remaining in good order to solve them. One is forced to
judge practical hazards and values from contradictory sides of
a myth, and to do so in isolation. Perhaps the ultimate questions
of morale, of personalization, or depersonalization, come into
play. But last of all, one must remember that, as they haul you
away, they are unlikely to understand anything you have thought
or felt about the world they have made.